Enjoy the Great Outdoors

The Ohio songwriter Spencer Radcliffe enlisted a seven-piece band for his latest album. The musicians give his doomy themes a billowing energy like a cloud of smoke.

Spencer Radcliffe has made most of his recorded music on his own and it shows. Both under his given name and with the dreary drone project Blithe Field, he’s made albums that feel vacant—soundtracks for late nights in empty rooms, when you’re probing big questions and finding no answers. But at some point in the couple years since he released his debut solo LP, Looking In—a bleary-eyed collection of slowly plotted songs that explored both existential and domestic anxieties—he decided he’d had enough of the loneliness.

“For now at least, the crest had been reached for the theme of [an] individual playing every instrument on a recording,” he told The Fader in March. So for his new album, he invited the band that he’d brought along on tour into the studio—alongside a few other friends—and called them “Everyone Else.” The resulting record, Enjoy the Great Outdoors, bears many of the same themes as his past recordings—smoke’s on the horizon, apocalypse is just a day away—but there’s an endearing looseness that he’s never achieved on his own.

On opener “Land & Sea,” his winding guitar lines creep around crawling, cymbal-heavy percussion. He dazedly describes a dream, but wakes up as the track takes shape. Elements steadily enter the frame—harrowed backing vocals, distant strings—and build towards a cacophonous conclusion. The song’s ebb and flow feels fitting of its title, but also represents Radcliffe’s subtle power as a bandleader—he mostly seems to stay out of the way.

As a result, the seven-piece band—which, on most songs, consists of drummer Jack Schemenauer, lead guitarist Grant Engstrom, cellist Ben Austin, bassist/keyboardist Nathan Dragon, singer Tina Scarpello, and Brennan Zwieg on Rhodes piano—has an energy that sort of billows. Lines loop around one another, intersecting occasionally, but mostly drifting in a slow-moving smoke cloud around Radcliffe’s muted pessimism. At the center of these are Radcliffe’s songs, which are as winningly downcast as anything in his catalog (or, for that matter, those of his young DIY rock peers like (Sandy) Alex G, Elvis Depressedly, and Girlpool). He’s always had a knack for writing soaring instrumentals with sinister undercurrents, but Enjoy the Great Outdoors has some of his most cleverly deceptive pieces yet.

“Slamming on the Brakes” begins with the opening couplet of The Sound of Music’s “Do-Re-Mi” (“Doe a deer/A female deer”), but something’s off. Radcliffe and his bandmates reduce the sprightly melody to a single note and turn it into body horror, as a mangled animal splatters across the hood of the narrator’s car. His talent as a songwriter is that it doesn’t just end there—he uses the accident to muse on the existential questions these sorts of songwriters are often mulling. He’s “praying for deliverance from a life of small mistakes,” but it never comes.

These songs hang heavy, as Radcliffe’s compositions often do, but his band keeps it from sinking too far into despair. “Wrong Turn”—the chorus of which gives the record its National Park Service slogan of a title—is another song that begins at the end of the world. Radcliffe’s narrator sees all-consuming fire in the distance and contemplates how nice it might be to drive his car right into the destruction. But the instrumental offers some ballast: Schemenauer’s percussion sets a cruise-control pace, Engstrom’s leads feel like a desert breeze, and drizzly strings lend a surprising coolness to the doomsday prophesying.

The chorus, then—“maybe we’d enjoy the great outdoors”—is winkingly undermined by the rest of the song, which is about driving to the ends of Earth to watch it all burn down. But the addition of Everyone Else makes it land a little differently. It’s not a solitary cruise into the sunset, but a road trip with a group of your best friends—even if the end result is still doom.